Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the biggest technological shift we have seen in our lifetime to date and will be the driving force behind India's economic growth, said Akash Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, at the Mumbai Tech Week held at Jio World Centre.
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Investing in AI, Research, and Talent
"In my view, AI is the engine that will empower India to grow at 10 percent or double-digit growth numbers for the foreseeable future," Ambani stated, noting that "India is one of the forefront nations that can adopt technology and use technology for the benefit of the country."
To establish India as a global AI leader, Ambani outlined three key areas of focus: infrastructure, deep research and development, and talent investment.
Akash Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, spoke during a fireside chat with Dream11 CEO Harsh Jain at the Mumbai Tech Week held at Jio World Centre.
Jio’s Impact on India's Digital Transformation
Opening the conversation about Jio and its achievements in India, Dream11 CEO Harsh Jain said that Jio is literally at the forefront of technology in India. "Every single person here is thankful for finally getting us 5G Internet at the best speeds possible while we travel. I get like 150 Mbps in my car, on my phone, which is just phenomenal," Jain said.
"..We're all very fortunate to be in a country where our domestic product itself can reach 800 million Indians thanks to Jio. And it's a great time to be running a tech company and to have tech startups for all the entrepreneurs out there," Jain added.
India is a Leader in Adopting Technology
Responding to Jain's question about India still being seen as a laggard in technology, Akash Ambani replied, "I feel the contrary."
"Today, eight years after launching Jio, we've become the biggest data-consuming nation in the world. We've led that every, every single hour, average consumption per user is now significantly higher than anywhere else in the world, including China. So I think gone are the days that we should think about India from a tech laggard perspective. I think we have established that India is one of the forefront nations that can adopt technology and use technology for the benefit of the country."
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Ambani further stated that as a fundamental block, "We need to continue investing in AI infrastructure and AI data centers that are fully equipped to scale globally and support millions of users in India. At Jio, we are already doing this. We recently announced in Jamnagar that we are building our AI data center, which will have a gigawatt capacity."
He also stressed the importance of deep research and development. "We continue to invest in deep research and deep development that comes from it," he said, crediting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision for AI advancement through the AI mission.
Additionally, Ambani highlighted the need to invest in the right talent. "At Jio, we've already invested in our overall full-stack AI team, which is led by data scientists, researchers and engineers to be a thousand plus. The critical element in this, I feel, is also to foster new ideas and push the boundaries of development," he said, adding, "It's not too far away where we will have a groundbreaking idea that will have half a billion people on one platform coming out of India."
Perception of India as a Tech Laggard
Challenging the perception that India lags in technology adoption, Ambani pointed to the country's rapid digital transformation. "I think we've already showcased to the world in connectivity that we can be the leaders of technology, not just be fast followers."
He recalled India's shift in internet usage and speeds since 2015, saying, "...Back to 2015, which is just 10 years ago, Internet speeds were less than 1 MB in this country, whether it be on the mobile or at home. But today, everyone continues to enjoy very high data speeds. And so I think from an AI point of view is these three critical items that we need to focus on," Ambani said.
Replying to Ambani, Jain said, "But then when we grew up and we saw speeds in America, we'd be like, what the hell? Why is our speed, you know, why is our Internet speed like this in India? And why is this like, apparently 3G giving me less than 1 Mbps? And today I can say that when we travel, we laugh at the world. We literally were there and we are like, wait, you pay 60-70 USD a month for crappy Internet? Boss, come to India, just try Jio for a while and then you'll see what we have. So thank you for that. It's been an amazing thing to see all of India benefit from this."
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AI Taking Over Jobs
Responding to Jain's question about whether AI will eliminate many jobs, Ambani said, "I'm a firm believer that AI will transform jobs. Today we've seen AI take over our mundane tasks, our repetitive tasks."
"We at Jio are already embracing it," Ambani said, adding, "We've seen how the Internet can create new industries and jobs, but this time, we can prepare for it. And by preparing, I mean equipping ourselves with the right tools and insights to excel our impact, excel our businesses. For example, at Jio, today we monitor our network, which now covers about 95 percent of the living population of India."
Leveraging AI for Network Monitoring
Before that, we had to monitor networks across different systems. "Today we can proactively monitor and before even a customer has a bad experience, experience, we can predict it. And this is just not, you know, something that is, this is again, instead of deeping/delving deep into the data, figuring out what the consumer does, the patterns are being picked up by ML and AI engineers to kind of spend the time to actually solve the problem than finding out what the problem is. So that's one way that we prepared," Ambani explained.
AI in Education
Responding to Jain's idea of leveraging AI to solve education challenges in India, Ambani said, "For us, there are five layers that create a deep technology company. In this particular use case, the first thing to solve for in education is connectivity, which we pretty much solved in India."
Five Layers
Today, 1.5 million schools have connectivity. The second layer is computing—both data center computing and edge computing. At Jio, we are advancing in both across the nation. "After that comes the devices layer where we have to enable devices that can consume and actually deliver to the endpoint which in this case will be the student across, affordability, standpoints across," Ambani explained, referring to low-cost consumer devices.
"So it may be a cloud PC laptop or a low-cost laptop. It could be a smartphone tomorrow. It can be AR glasses that we can use to deliver these devices across to enhance the experience that
we can actually deliver. On top of that comes the content layer where content not in the form of videos but just educational content or anything. And then comes the intelligence layer. So these five layers put together, you know, enable us to become solving big problems like education," Ambani said.
"And finally the five layers that I spoke about, they need to create an absolutely seamless customer experience. If they do not create a seamless customer experience that is easy to adopt, easy to have, then it becomes very, very hard for us to solve large issues like the literacy rate and education in India. We're going to be doing that," he added.
He further said the same approach applies to agriculture, IoT devices, and healthcare. At Jio, we will work to scale solutions and impact millions of students and schools in India, Ambani said.
Aspiring Indian: AI
Jain expressed that the future of AI and technology in India will only be realized through full collaboration between public and private sectors.
Ambani responded, "We're extremely lucky to be under the visionary leadership of our Prime minister Narendra Modi on this." I think, it is the biggest blessing of our country to have a leader like him leading this mission. "Recently, at Parliament, he mentioned that AI does not only just start for artificial intelligence. It actually stands for Aspiring Indian."
Jio as a Platform Company
When asked whether Jio aims to become a platform company like Google, Amazon, Apple, or Meta, Ambani said, "At Jio, we also imagine ourselves to be platform companies. One of our biggest growth missions
of Jio and the way where we want to make impact is connecting each home. And in the home, we not only offer broadband connectivity but we offer our own OS which is a Tele OS that powers the large screen at the home."
"It is our vision to reach 100 million homes in the shortest amount of time possible. And I think we have now the technology and the demand to do so to enable that."
Replying to Ambani, Jain said, Take UPI, for example. We've almost started to take it for granted. But when you travel, you realize how far behind the world is in peer-to-peer payments. India has leapfrogged ahead.
"The way Jio took us from, you know, 3G, which wasn't working properly, to like 5G, which is the world's best…in a few years we leapfrogged that entire technology wave. And I can tell you all it's a small secret between 5,000 of us. But you know, this is not just a vision, this is actually something that, that Akash has running in his home. What you're talking, what he's talking about here is like, you know, have any of you all seen Iron man movie with Jarvis. Right? That's the kind of stuff they already have and they're working on to bring to our homes," Jain said, addressing the audience.
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Cloud-based AI PC
Ambani then spoke about enabling entrepreneurship. One possibility is GPU as a service—creating a foundation for developers to build on. Similarly, we will soon launch a cloud-based AI PC. You can read more about the Cloud-Based AI PC in the story linked above.
Jio Campus Open for Visits
He also announced that Jio's Mumbai campus, spanning 500 acres and home to 25,000 people, including 10,000–12,000 Jio employees, is now open for public visits.
